When Two Tribes Battle, Physics Wins

Their battlefield was the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. The two opposing armies were 3,000-strong, made of top-class physicists. The big prize was the elusive Higgs boson, the God particle, the basis of a “secret, invisible force field running the universe”. 
   
The LHC, a 17-mile-long underground construction on the Swiss-French border, is capable of simulating conditions like temperatures and pressures when the universe was formed. And it was in these conditions that the elusive Higgs boson, if it existed, could be found. 
    
The hunt for the Higgs boson – named after Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who conjectured its existence – was probably the largest and most expensive science project ever. It involved several experiments, false alarms and reams of data that had to be analysed, checked and cross-checked before anything of value could be admitted as evidence. 
    
At The New York Times, Dennis Overbye documents the rivalry between two teams of physicists, codenamed CMS and Atlas, charged with finding the Higgs boson. The story 
begins with Vivek Sharma, the coordinator of the CMS physicists, taking a break from his work at CERN to celebrate his daughter’s birthday. To his horror, while on vacation, Sharma read a message that the rival Atlas team had succeeded in discovering the Higgs Boson. He cut short his holiday and flew back the following day. The report turned out to be false, but it set off a frenzy of activity among the two teams. 
    
The story details the teams’ attempts to reach 5-sigma – running experiments, dealing with random data and eliminating noise until both teams were able to independently come to a point where the evidence pointed to a 5-sigma result (a chance in 25 million that the evidence was misleading) – which would be acceptable proof that the Higgs boson had indeed been found. 
    
The search culminated on June 22 last year. Thousands of pages of reports were read. The CERN auditorium opened after a three-day lockdown. There, in front of flashing cameras and a rapt audience, both CMS and Atlas teams independently confirmed the existence of the God particle. And, thus, ended the war for holy matter.